The overall goal is to develop tools to assist physicians in using imaging devices to reliably detect malignant melanoma in its early stages. The proposed effort has three aims: 1) to determine feasibility of detecting early melanoma through extraction of information - not otherwise available to the physician - by wavelet transformation of multispectral images of cutaneous lesions; 2) to combine diagnostic parameters extracted from such wavelet representations with other parameters obtained from untransformed grey-level images; and 3) to develop wavelet-based compression methods applicable to multispectral images for telemedicine - and suitable for both human and machine vision. The first two goals are for Phase 1. If either or both of these goals are met, the third one would be pursued in Phase 2. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: Potentially standard PC-based wavelet transformation software, both for lesion image representation and for image compression. Would be applicable both to conventional and to dermoscopic images obtained with a film camera or with a CCD- based multispectral imaging system.